The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  Dedication

  For my parents, who filled my childhood with books and love

  Epigraph

  If I can stop one heart from breaking,

  I shall not live in vain;

  If I can ease one life the aching,

  Or cool one pain,

  Or help one fainting robin

  Unto his nest again,

  I shall not live in vain.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .* About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Also by Cat Winters

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The Buchanan branch of the American Protective League, better known as the APL, continues to urge residents to report all suspicious activity to the group’s headquarters at the Chamber of Commerce on Willow Street. As a reminder, typical enemy behavior includes the following tendencies: food hoarding; interference with the draft; slackers who refuse to enlist for military duty; refusal to purchase Liberty Bonds; possession of books, sheet music, and phonograph albums celebrating German culture; speaking a language other than English; the use of hyphenated nationalities when describing one’s self (e.g., “German-American,” “Polish-American,” etc.); anti-war sentiments; the production of Socialist pamphlets and newspapers; and the discussion of unionization among factory workers. The APL states that this country’s best defense against espionage and other war-related crimes involves everyday Americans monitoring the loyalty of their neighbors. “We encourage each Buchanan citizen to do his part in chasing the dangerous specter of Germany out of Illinois,” said local APL chief Charles Williams. “We commend every single individual who takes it upon himself to cleanse the country of the enemy.”

  —BUCHANAN SENTINEL, October 4, 1918

  Chapter 1

  I admit, I had seen a ghost or two.

  The childhood night my mother’s father died, when silver moonlight graced the floorboards and the antique furniture in our front room, I came upon my granny Letty—gone one year and a month—rocking in my mother’s chair, next to the upright piano.

  Uncle Bert—gone since 1896—stood on our front porch at sundown on Independence Day 1912. The bitter smoke of his fat cigar stole through the metal screen of our front door, spoiling the aroma of Mama’s cherry pie. A half hour after he left, we received a telephone call from my cousin, saying my aunt Eliza had died of appendicitis.

  Uncle Bert again smoked on our porch the day my brother Billy was shot in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in September 1918.

  I likely don’t need to mention that these Uninvited Guests were not welcome sights. My mother saw them, too, and she agreed that such visits always signaled loss. Their presence suggested that the wall dividing the living and the dead had opened a crack, and one day that crack might steal us away to the other side.

  Granny Letty paid another call to our house October 4, 1918. I saw her but a moment, standing in the yellow haze of twilight near the lace curtains of my bedroom, just an hour before my father and brother killed a man.

  OUR FRONT DOOR BLEW OPEN and whacked the wall. The dogs barked. Someone groaned in pain. Mama’s bare soles hurried down the staircase.

  “What on earth happened?” she asked, her voice coming as a muffled shriek beyond the walls of my upstairs bedroom.

  I rubbed at my forehead, finding my skin covered in sticky sweat. Spurred on by the panic surging through the house, I managed to climb out of bed after three days spent on my back with the flu. My legs buckled. I grabbed hold of my bedside table and knocked copies of Motion Picture magazine and Emily Dickinson’s Poems to the floor with thumps and smacks and the wild fluttering of pages. The stripes of my brown and yellow wallpaper blurred and rippled before my eyes.

  “What happened?” shouted Mama again from down below.

  I pushed myself upright, fetched my robe from the back of my door, and eased my way down the staircase on the legs of a feeble old woman, not feeling at all like a twenty-five-year-old young lady used to farm work and activity. To keep my balance, I clung to the rail with both hands, as if clutching the helm of a sinking ship.

  Down in the front room, my father guided my seventeen-year-old brother, Peter, toward the kitchen by half-dragging the boy beneath his armpits. Peter’s right fist swelled and purpled and no longer looked like a human hand. Something dark lined the crevices in his knuckles and stained Father’s overalls. The two of them resembled each other with such chilling similarity at the moment—wheat-blond hair, stocky Illinois builds, large blue eyes, dazed by booze and some unknown horror. The house reeked of whiskey because of them.

  Mama hounded the men into the kitchen. I clasped my temples to keep my head from swaying off my neck and rolling to the ground—which it seemed inclined to do—and followed after everyone.

  “What did you do?” Mama grabbed Peter by the wrist and pumped cold water from the sink over those ballooning fingers. Peter hollered with the same unholy racket he had made when he knocked out two teeth jumping off a fence at the age of five.

  Father, his face bright red, perspiration dripping off his nose, braced himself against the kitchen table. “The Krauts killed our Billy,” he said in a voice that was slurred and gravelly, “and they dumped this damned flu into our country. I read it in the paper. They turned the germs loose in an American theater.”

  “What did you do?” asked Mama again. “Whose blood is this?”

  Father lowered his head toward the table and swayed. “The damned Kraut went and died.”

  I pulled my robe around my chest.

  Mama turned off the water and gaped at my father.

  “What are you talking about, Frank? What German went and died?”

  Peter leaned over the sink and vomited. Father just stood there at the table and rocked from the alcohol and the aftermath of whatever violence they had just wreaked upon some poor soul.

  “Those Krauts who own that furniture store—the last store in town owned by German immigrant bastards . . .” Father cleared his throat with a grinding ruckus that reminded me of our old tractor sputtering its last breaths. “One of them got himself killed.”

  Mama gasped. Before she could utter a word, Father added, “The police know. Everything will be fine. We don’t want another Collinsville case, like that Prager lynching. No national attention.”

  He said all of this with his face hanging down toward the uneven grain that ran in scraggly lines across the table’s blond wood.

  Mama paled. “Are you saying that you and Peter killed a man tonight?”

  “No.” Father shook his head. “That wasn’t a man. He was a German.”

  I turned and staggered out of the room.

  I was done.

  Our oak staircase seemed to stretch four stories high above me, but I grabbed the handrail and forced myself to a
scend the steps, my breathing labored, the muscles in my back and legs quivering and threatening to send me toppling back down to the ground floor. My parents’ shouts and cries down below roused me out of the delusion that this was all just the hallucination of a fever dream.

  “Stop yelling at me, Alice!” said Father from the kitchen, his voice volleying across the dark-wood walls around me. “It was just a German. A goddamned German. You should be proud of your boy and me. You should be proud.”

  I shook all over and panted for air. Upstairs, the stripes on my bedroom walls continued to wiggle and blur, but I somehow changed into a skirt and a blouse and packed two canvas bags full of clothing, toiletries, Emily Dickinson’s poems, and Peter’s old copy of J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, which I read to him when he was no more than ten. I also grabbed Billy’s letters from the war, including my favorite one: an optimistic note that included Billy’s caricature of one of my piano students—prim little Ruby Rogers—putting Kaiser Wilhelm to sleep by boring him with a sonata. Kaiser Willie snoozed on our settee and rested his feet on one of the hounds, while Ruby plunked on the keys of our piano.

  I buttoned up my green wool coat and fitted my knit cloche over my hair, which I didn’t even bother taking the time to pin up. With both suitcases and my purse in hand, I turned my back on the lace and ruffled bedroom that had housed me from infancy to womanhood, and I shut the door behind me.

  Mama sat at the bottom of the staircase and cried into a handkerchief monogrammed with a gold R for our surname: Rowan. She looked hunched and small and old in the black dress she wore to mourn Billy. Her neck straightened when I brushed past her with my bags. Her damp brown eyes peered up at me with almost childlike astonishment.

  “I need to go, Mama.” I rested my luggage on the floor and wrapped my hand over her shoulder, which drooped from her stooped-over posture. “It’ll likely take me a while to fully recover from this illness, but I can’t stay here another minute.”

  She nodded with her lips pursed and grabbed hold of my fingers, her hand as cold as winter. “You should have left years ago, Ivy. You’re twenty-five, for goodness sake. You wasted so much of your youth hiding away in this—”

  “Don’t.” I squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t make me feel like an old maid again. You know quite well I stayed because of—”

  “I know.” She nodded, her eyes moist and bloodshot. “Billy always called you ‘Wendy Darling’ because of how much you watched over him and Peter, didn’t he?”

  “That’s what happens”—I peeked over my shoulder, toward the sound of Father clanking the neck of a whiskey bottle against an empty glass in the kitchen—“when one lives with Captain Hook.”

  “You should have gotten yourself married to Wyatt Pettyjohn after school.”

  “I’ve always been too choosy. You know that.”

  “Life’s too short to be that choosy.”

  “For some people it is. But for others”—I swallowed and turned away from her white-streaked hair and red-rimmed eyes—“life’s far too long to not be selective.”

  She removed her hand from mine.

  I bent forward and kissed her cheek, tasting salt and the burn of her sorrow. “I’m not going far,” I said, my voice low, my lips shaking. “Probably just to town for now.”

  “I can’t even remember the last time you went to town.”

  “Helen dragged me out to a Douglas Fairbanks picture the afternoon before she left. Remember?”

  “That was way back in July.”

  “I know.” I stood up straight, my hand still upon her. “Come stay with me if you feel like leaving, too. I know the farm is doing well right now, but all that prosperity isn’t worth”—I glanced back toward the kitchen again—“this.”

  “Yes.” She wiped her eyes. “I will, darling. I’ll join you if I need to.”

  I let her go, and a connection snapped. A binding stronger than the cord that had once tethered me to her womb frayed and split in two, and my stomach ached. The pain hit me again when I opened the front door and walked out on the commotion of Peter blubbering in the kitchen and Father choking on his drink. Despite my discomfort, I ducked my head out from under the black cloud that would now haunt my family worse than my Uninvited Guests, and I left that troubled white farmhouse.

  Chapter 2

  My westward journey led me close to a mile down a country lane to Willow Street, once called Werner Street, before the war made us cleanse the country of everything German. A train whistle pealed through the clear night air, and I heard the steady click-clack, click-clack, click-clack of the endless line of freight cars that would take a good fifteen minutes or more to traverse the heart of the town. My legs gained strength, and without a shred of regret, I passed the other farms in our pancake-flat Illinois terrain, toward the town I hadn’t visited in three months, out of fear of brain-cleaving migraines and a paralyzing terror that the house would crumble to pieces if I dared to step away for a spell. Both brothers no longer belonged to me. Wendy Darling had failed her boys. Time to move onward.

  Another mile ahead shone a constellation of streetlights in downtown Buchanan, where most of the businesses slept for the night. To my left, past the southbound bend of the Minter River, rose the mills and the factories that seemed almost a separate city of their own. The black outlines of smokestacks and rooftops as flat as the land bled into the darkness of the nighttime sky, and I almost believed I imagined their towering silhouettes. Our city made itself known for its textile industry and railcar manufacturing—plus we boasted the county seat—so we were somewhere, compared to hundreds of other towns speckled across the vast Midwest. Some of our buildings, including City Hall, even stood over three stories high, and most were built of brick and a fine Illinois limestone.

  A quarter mile or so from the first downtown establishments, before I crossed the old covered bridge that spanned the river, a sign painted red on white rose up in the dark:

  INFLUENZA!

  DO NOT ENTER!

  My feet stopped on the road, and a cold October breeze shook through my dress and my bones. The sign seemed primitive—medieval—like a warning for European travelers about to stumble upon the Black Death. It defied logic. Buchanan had been fighting influenza strains since it first existed in the 1860s, but no one had ever been stopped from entering the town because of it.

  I kept plodding forward along Willow-not-Werner Street with my bags banging against the sides of my calves, and enter the town I did. Another sign, a hospitable black-and-white one, greeted me as I came upon the business district.

  WELCOME TO BUCHANAN, ILLINOIS!

  FRIENDLIEST CITY IN AMERICA

  POPULATION 12,500

  I passed the barbershop, the Buchanan Sentinel headquarters, and the Moonbeam Theater, the latter in which Billy had spent his days and nights as the projectionist after he left home at the age of seventeen. A poster for a Mary Pickford film called Johanna Enlists caught my eye, and I remembered how much my chest had once fluttered with anticipation whenever I spotted new motion-picture advertisements. When we all still went to school, Billy, Helen Fay, Sigrid Landvik, Wyatt Pettyjohn, and I would sit on wooden folding chairs inside the darkened theater and watch marvelous flickering fairy tales, projected onto a bed sheet used as a screen—back when downtown Buchanan possessed magic. When Saturday afternoons tasted of heaven.

  Ford delivery trucks rested alongside the curbs in front of several storefronts, the black paint gleaming beneath electric streetlamps with bright, bulbous casings. In front of other businesses awaited wooden wagons that would be drawn by horses in the morning. Telephone and electricity wires dangled overhead, strapped to ugly utility poles, and streetcar tracks ran the length of Willow Street, tying the business district to the Westside neighborhoods, where the nonfarming middle class dwelled. I saw rows of white awnings and autumn-kissed maples that hadn’t yet shaken free of their leaves.

  Up ahead another block, to my right, lay Liberty Brothers Furniture, which h
ad been called some other name like Schreiner or Schumacher Furniture before the war. Unless I veered down a side street, I would be required to pass the store’s front door and its prominent display windows on my way to my destination: the town’s hotel. Furthermore, I needed to pass the store, to see—to witness with my own eyes—whatever grisly aftermath might await inside. Part of me hoped Father and Peter were simply telling a terrible tall tale, offering empty, drunken boasts about conquering the town’s last remaining German business owners.

  The light of the streetlamp in front of the store twinkled across a sidewalk littered with shattered fragments of glass. Someone had smashed the front windows and the pane of the door with a blunt and powerful object, perhaps Peter’s baseball bat. Long streaks of yellow paint dribbled down the bricks and the black trim of the outer walls and formed soupy puddles on the cement. Spots of blood trailed out from the front door and disappeared behind me, toward our home. The entire scene made stories of the American Protective League’s raids on German families and union headquarters sound tidy and civil in comparison.

  I dared to tread a few steps closer to peek inside, and the soles of my shoes crunched across the sparkling shards. My mind conjured images of the Germans I’d seen on the propaganda posters—fleshy men in spiked helmets with hate raging in their animalistic eyes. Huns, we called them. Boches. Krauts. Like the lecherous Mr. Weiss, whom the citizens of Buchanan had kicked out of town for failing to buy Liberty Bonds. They smelled of sauerkraut, and they spat as they spoke. They loved beer and war and indulged in rape and torture the same way we enjoyed baseball and summer picnics.

  Only one person stood inside the store amid the damaged furniture. It was a man, a young one near my age, also in his mid-twenties, if I had to wager. He had short brown hair with a soft hint of curl and broad shoulders that hunched as if in either pain or sorrow. Or both. He stood there in the middle of the mess my family had hurled upon the business, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his tan trousers, his face directed toward a dark stain that marred the floorboards. He wore a tweed vest and white shirtsleeves and looked to be a gentleman, not a brute.